Conflict Over How Open ‘Do Not Track’ Talks Will Be

WASHINGTON — Technology companies want to talk with the government about protecting privacy on the Internet. They just want those talks to be private.

Representatives of advertising companies, Internet sites and technology companies told a House subcommittee on Thursday that they thought Internet privacy policies, including Do Not Track options, should be created through an “open and transparent” process, as two government agencies have recommended.

But openness is relative. “If this process takes the form of a public discussion, industry participants will be looking over their shoulders or sitting on their hands instead of offering bold ideas for workable solutions,” said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, a trade association of software, hardware and technology consulting companies.

The Commerce Department and the Federal Trade Commission, which are encouraging companies to be more open with consumers about their privacy policies, say that any such talks should be accessible to, if not include, Internet users.

“We don’t think there is any substitute for openness and transparency,” Lawrence E. Strickling, assistant secretary for communication and information at the Commerce Department, told the subcommittee, a part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Lawyers for companies are free to talk among themselves about the best practices in protecting consumer privacy, he said, but to give consumers faith in the process, “the sessions we conduct will be open and transparent.”

The hearing on consumer privacy, the fifth by the House panel, comes after the recent release by the White House and the F.T.C. of recommendations for how to protect personal data that individuals leave behind when they surf the Internet.

As Internet privacy has become a bigger issue in Washington, technology companies have been increasing their lobbying. Google and Facebook recently bolstered their lobbying teams. Google hired Susan Molinari, a former New York congresswoman. Facebook hired Greg Maurer, a former aide to House Speaker John Boehner.

Photo

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., says the group takes Do Not Track to mean not collecting any data from consumers.Credit
Win McNamee/Getty Images

Both companies, along with others, are likely to be engaged in the coming months with the trade commission, which called this week for legislation to regulate data brokers, companies that buy and sell personal data to help build online profiles of consumers. Technology companies fear that the F.T.C. might be drafting a definition of data brokers that is so broad it includes almost any company that collects user information online.

Jon Leibowitz, the F.T.C.’s chairman, also got the industry’s attention when he said this week that if companies could not create robust Do Not Track policies themselves, he would favor legislation requiring it.

Some members of Congress are not so sure.

“Before we do any possible harm to the Internet, we need to understand what harm is actually being done to consumers,” Representative Mary Bono Mack, a California Republican and subcommittee chairwoman, said at the hearing. “Where is the public outcry for legislation? Today, I’m simply not hearing it. I haven’t gotten a single letter from anyone back home urging me to pass a privacy bill.”

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The idea of a law requiring companies to permit consumers to forbid tracking them online has upset several technology companies as well. When the White House presented its privacy framework in February, an online advertising alliance said it would support adding a Do Not Track option to all browsers by the end of 2012.

When the trade commission released its report on Monday, however, members of the group, the Digital Advertising Alliance, said they were surprised by Mr. Leibowitz’s comments about Do Not Track legislation. He said the commission took Do Not Track to mean not collecting any data from consumers.

The advertising group, however, defines it as forbidding the serving of targeted ads to individuals but not prohibiting the collection of data.

“That is not what was agreed to,” Linda A. Woolley, executive vice president of the Direct Marketing Association, a member of the digital alliance, said Thursday in an interview. She said that was like moving the goal posts.

Some technology companies are continuing to head down the path of Do Not Track, at a speed far more rapid than the usual pace of Congressional legislation. On Thursday, Yahoo said that it would put a Do Not Track option on its sites that would tell its network sites that a user did not want to be tracked.

Users who turn on the Do Not Track option in their browsers and visit a Yahoo Web site will not see targeted ads, the company said, but the site will collect user data. The announcement follows similar moves by companies that make browsers, including Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, to include a Do Not Track mechanism in their privacy settings.

Edward Wyatt reported from Washington and Tanzina Vega from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2012, on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Conflict Over How Open ‘Do Not Track’ Talks Will Be. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe